scarecrowbob

I am about 2 years in to my off-grid solar setup. The cost for the easement was looking to be about $25k, plus about 30k for the wire, transformer, et.

I live in middle of nowhere so I just built out a system myself. I am about 8k into it. It's not the biggest system (6kw inverter, 4kw panels, 15kwh storage) but it's fine for one old man living a 2kM in the high desert.

I'm writing this from my off grid shack.

I have 15kwh of lifepo, and even if it weren't hooked to 4kw of solar I could still run my fridge, charge my phone, and run the fan in my fireplace for 4-6 days... longer if I dump the fridge.

It's 6U of deep 19" rack space.

So 2 x that isn't an entire shed-sized battery.

Though I'd happily have a shed-sized battery... I suspect that delivering and covering something that size would cost more than the batteries I already have, though.

If it helps, I have been in a work group on this issue locally for the last 8 months or so.

Most of the folks in that work group are to the left of Democrats, and most of the pro-flock folks here, locally, are Democrats and law-and-order GOP folks.

So to me, the (locally a-typical) political orientation of the person committing the politically-charged crime seems relevant.

A lot of us have very little love for authoritarian regimes.

At the same time, all through out my life I have seen folks in the US us their fantasies CCP as reason to accept a government that they feel is the gold standard for freeedom.

I submit to you that what you're hearing are folks who are even more concerned with not being oppressed than you are telling you that it's not that great here for those of us on, say, the anarchist left or among the black radical tradition or whatever.

If your history begins at the fall of the berlin wall and you are happy about the ecological destruction being directly created by the US and the carcerial state it represents then of course you're going to read things the way you do.

But the reality is that most of us are just tired of hearing how fucking free the US is when they just sentenced 19 of our people in Texas to what are effectively life sentences for participating in a protest that went sideways when one participant decided he didn't want to see the state summarily execute a kid for vandalism.

I don't think most folks I know in the US are willing to touch the historical wrongs (genocide and slavery) with a 3.048M pole.

I think this view indicates that you have either had very few personal interactions with specific fascists or you don't have a very specific sense of how they are working.

It's easy to hide a lot of objectionable stuff in metonymy.

It feels reasonable to me to think of a "country" as the people who live there; doubly so when discussing a putative democracy.

But sure, I will entertain the idea that you mean something different that literally every other person I've encountered who has uttered that similar sentiment:

if the claim is that the owning-class of the US are seeing the results of their 400-year-long racist, genocidal campaign to enslave the world and exploit every crevice of the planet come home to roost in the form of a decaying ability to present themselves as ethically okay...

sure I can agree to that.

But honestly, I don't think that's what you're trying to say.

How do some third graders in Alabama deserve this? How do my 22-year-old waiter friends in rural Texas deserve this?

What exactly did they do to deserve this?

People say this a lot, and I usually think it's said by folks who haven't thought about it much.

As a person who makes a lot of music, I don't care if folks have fun. In fact I am having such a hard time caring hat folks do or how they do it I can't get motivated to book any shows this season.

But the part you're missing is when folks make these things and then say "yeah, you see this thing we're doing? That's what we think -you- are doing." LIke when someone sets up an LLM to shit out some song lyrics, I don't care if they are having fun doing it, but I think it displays a lot of contempt for [insert an songwriting artist youlike here] to claim that the LLM is doing the same thing.

Which is fine and all- I've got plenty of unmitigated contempt for my fellow humans.

And you don't even need a computer to do that- I've released a certain amount of music that is facile and boring and in retrospect understand why folks were dismissive.

But if you want to understand why folks who consider themselves invested in their craft (or even invested in other artists' craft) are dismissive of these things, then you might consider how radically dismissive of craft these kinds of cultural products might seem to artists.

I get that it's a single case, but Darlene Graham did just take Lindsey Graham's spot, like, yesterday.

When folks who live around me vote for things I find unethical, then I don't feel bound by those decisions.

Also, your position on weapons development is premised on the idea that at lease some of the folks developing the weapons are on your side and always will be.

That might not be true at all.

Because they aren't "safer" for the folks getting killed.

Historically, the folks doing the murdering just don't care about the folks they kill, so "safer for the killers" isn't a win for most of us.

"More precision" isn't about killing less folks, it's about making it safer and easier for folks who kill folks to do that work.

So those of us who dislike killing don't like these tools because we consider them to be immoral.

It's possible that you're genuine in your confusion here; it is, however very hard for me to believe that there are people who genuinely don't understand that when the state spends money it -goes somewhere-.

Its fun for me to read these comments as a person who hates the US military.

Because I know the pipe hitters working for JSOC are really just as fucked up and superstitious as any boko haram nutjobs, and the magic that the "operators" believe in is just as idealistic and disconnected from material reality evn if it's stated "rationally" and scientistically as you've done here.

The "difference" that you're stating is purely imaginary, hoss. Those assholes are getting cranked up because it's easier to kill folks, and that's the same deal weather you're team "deus vult" or whatever odd stuff the Boko Haram folks are into- yall are all just into killing people at the end of the day.

"It's different because we have science"... get out of here with that LOL

Yeah, I don't know how this whole ARPANET thing is really going to play out...

"That said, it is undeniable that USA would have more issues pulling that off domestically, and, arguably, even internationally."

You think so?

I spend a lot of time working with (actual) anarchists in the US, and most of us are far more worried about the US gov putting us in jail (or murdering us outright) for our signal chats, protests, and "actions" than literally anything that the PRC might consider doing to us.

Yeah a lot of us are tired of it. I dislike the democrats intensely.

I also dislike the GOP folks intensely.

Which is why I dislike your line of reasoning here: -you- are playing the game we are all tired of.

Like, no shit the Dems didn't drop the files because it implicates folks like Bill Clinton.

But that doesn't make it the case that DT would be okay with the files dropping either.

And it doesn't make it the case that much of the highly spectacular actions his admin takes has nothing to do with achieving material goals and everything to do with keeping his base (which at this point should seem pretty damn dumb given how much damage he has personally done to them) entertained, angry, and confused.

And --you-- are the one who brought out the Dems here.

You. You are the person doing the thing we are all tired of.

Stop it.

Four corners, but out in a county.

I quit in '23. I didn't have F-U money (heck, I don't have running water) but I did inherit some money from my parents when they passed, enough to buy a shack on some land and to get my living expenses low enough that running sound and playing music could pay the bills.

I will note that I did quit before my parents passed on, mostly because my kids (I am 48 and had them young) had graduated college and I realized I wasn't going to make enough in my remaining working years to both buy a house where I want to live and fully retire.

So I quit and lived in my truck and did stage hand gigs that payed a better day rate than I got programming, even though they were only a couple of days a month.

I am in EMT school because I like to do first aid at festivals and support my local free clinic. One of my recording clients just left with the masters of his album he cut out at my off-grid, solar-powered recording studio.

In additions to the realizations about the reality of retirement, I just got tired of answer pages to reboot a server at 1am because my boss was to cheap to offload some containers to a second server.

Also, I enjoy programming (this last winter I re-learned C to work with ESP32), but watching the less-talented folks at the biz use it as a crutch to make ever cruftier, bug riddled stuff made me a little repulsed.

It didn't help that I was doing WordPress customization/hosting/troubleshooting for large institutional clients- for as much money as it made me, it is was still a towering pile of shit that required being able to really work all parts of the stack including layer-zero issues.

So here I am, Dale-Gribbling it up in the middle of nowhere, unemployed, unable to tell the difference between massive inflation and massive gains in my portfolio, sitting a rural shack in Colorado surrounded by a bunch of musical instruments.

Yall should quit while there is still time, if you can.

" If you want to start shooting people, then prepare for a well-deserved, long prison sentence."

* unless you're a law-enforcement officer, in which case folks like laughing_man are totally okay with you killing folks for vandalism because it upholds the legal system.

Yeh, learn Diné and Ute or go back to Scotland.

I read it two days ago in the textbook for the EMS course that I am working through right now.

I only lived in Austin for a couple of years, but I grew up in the Amarillo and Lubbock and am a direct descendant of the racist, slave-holding white settlers who signed on the Texas Declaration of Independence.

I can concede that there are plenty of nice folks and pretty places in the state.

That's the line the person you're responding to is fishing for: somehow the people in the state aren't responsible for the oligarchy that runs it. Somehow folks aren't responsible for not knowing how oppressive that political situation is for everyone who isn't shaped like them.

I've left Texas; your points here agree with my understanding.

Texas is nothing special- I can get the same cedar fever out on my 40 acres in rural Colorado, but the view is better. I'd rather live out here where I have an outhouse than try and find parking in the green belt and go climb on a few chipped and shitty 40-foot rock climbs in a 104* sauna.

I did go down for 18 days of the Kerrville Folk Festival this year- that and my kiddo who lives in Dallas are the only things that can pull me that far south any more.

It's a just-fine place if you're okay with the highly authoritarian politics.

A lot of folks clearly are okay with those restrictions on their behavior. They see the state as only repressing other people; if the state is murdering black and brown folks (say, folks like Sandra Bland for instance), it's clearly because that's the natural, normal thing for a state to do. And it's somehow never going to affect them.

Maybe their sister has never wanted reproductive healthcare and needed a drive from Lubbock to San Antonio and back to get 2 pills. Of course, now that's not even possible, so maybe that kind of state repression is no longer relevant?

But I feel that kind of stuff in my day to day life, and I can't really ignore it.

It's not much better west of the Pecos, but at least there are fewer people here.

Oh no, you mean I might not be able to get another really annoying job so I can, what, have more money than I need to live on?

I used to get paged at 1am to mess with downed webservers, now I hang out in a shack with no running water in rural CO.

I'm 48 and have a chunk of cash that made more last year than I've ever been able to make in a single year doing salaried labor as a programmer.

I quit 3 years ago when my kiddo graduated college and have been just living on that and my small A/V production business.

It's great.

I do a lot of work; I have done first aid at one music festival, paid sound at a bluegrass festival, and sat around doing random volunteer stuff at another. I can give the local music school and the local civic orchestra really good bids on doing sound for them. I am going to get an EMT cert because I have a friend who contracts to do first-aid at festivals.

I'm not at all worried that my (pre-LLM) programming skills and connections are going away- I've replaced them with mandolin skills and much happier.

Well, it's a weird site. Most of my interactions are through the /active page or specific search terms. When I started to do that in about 2021 it certainly made it a lot easier to find what I as curious about.

Unfortunately, what I wanted to know also changed, in that I now use the site to keep tabs on the thoughts of folks are or who fund and work for hard-right technocrats.

There are, of course, many other folks on the site.

At the same time, the US techno-fascists both have an outsized influence on our lives and it's much harder to find their voices in other places: folks who, for instance, think Peter Thiel is of course quite sane and probably not trying to figure out a way to kill vast chunks of us off (and that it would be a reasonable thing if he were).

It's okay that I only killed, like, one of your kids, you have, like, 4.

Right?

So, question from the peanut gallery:

how is this different than saying if folks don't get a job it's just because they "weren't qualified"?

And isn't that just a tautology?

Isn't the point that we might think that getting a terminal degree would qualify a person for some kind of job in their field?

I mean, "I'm not too poor to eat, I just can't find anyone to sell me food at a price I can afford" is -a- take, but maybe not a helpful one.

Are you missing the /s?

As much as I enjoy DA, Kuhn takes it a little further- it's almost like folks live in completely different worlds because the worlds are made up of fundamentally different basic parts...

I found Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" helpful on this topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...